She keeps them in a nondescript box in her apartment, and occasionally gives them to friends. One of her closest friends is Ian Frazier, her colleague at the New Yorker who has about seventy-five of them. For this, the first-ever exhibition of Malcolm’s bookmarks, I asked Frazier to pick some of his favorites and say a few words about them.

“To have these amazing works of art just casually to hand is a powerful and privileged thing. With the natural entropy of a household many of the bookmarks will disperse into our library and stay hidden in one book or another, waiting to be rediscovered at a future moment, by my wife or me or maybe by our heirs, or by the people at the annual League of Women Voters Book Sale here in Montclair, or in some way I can’t imagine. I love that conceptual aspect of Janet’s ingenious bookmark oeuvre.

“Using one of her bookmarks is like having a precision tool that fits the hand and that’s also a work of art. I think I read more because of them. Like all writers, I read for many reasons, and the books I read can be wonderful or mediocre or worse than mediocre. The bookmarks are the equal of any book I read and are superior to many of them. With one of Janet’s bookmarks I feel well equipped to deal with any book.

“Many of the bookmarks are really funny. I especially like the ones with Socialist-realist elements, like the heroic painting of the man in the blue uniform above the caption, ‘As Li Yu-ho is about to contact the knife grinder at the gruel stall, Japanese gendarmes start a search. Li calmly pours gruel over the secret code hidden in his lunch box.’”